Turkish Awakening (15 page)

I used to watch this advert on my way to work in the financial district, where I learned a number of surprising things about the way Turkish businesses work, shortly after arriving in the country. The first lesson was that a successful company based in a shiny skyscraper in the middle of the City might well be employing a significant proportion of its staff off the books, while awarding them big bonuses. When I started working at a rather glamorous publishing company, I was handed an envelope full of cash at the end of my first week and taken for lunch by the editor in chief. A friend of mine works for a business data publication based in Istanbul, which claims to be based in Dubai for tax reasons, and she is paid in cash which comes via an account in the Virgin Islands. What I thought at first was highly dubious tax evasion in my individual company turned out to be pretty widespread
policy. I went on to work freelance in other companies – banks, marketing companies – and discovered the real meaning of ‘normal' business practice here.

Over forty per cent of Turks are employed off the books. This is because for every employee in Turkey, their employer must pay the equivalent of their salary in tax and social security to the government; an official employee is twice as expensive as an unofficial one. Many companies cannot afford to put people on the books, so employees often accept a slightly higher hourly rate but have to pay their own social security. They will also have no pension or insurance provision, of course, but for many Turks, this is not as terrifying as it might be for a Brit. A pervading belief in
kismet
(fate) usually means that Turks will chance it whenever necessary: ‘What will be, will be,' they say. ‘
Kismet
.' If God decides to strike them down with flu or redundancy, that is His will, but it is more than a religious belief. It is an attitude: Turks live in the moment.

The AKP are believers in
kismet
but they are also believers in tax, so they are trying hard to encourage people to employ or be employed on the books. This usually takes the form of scare tactics; for example, a British consultancy company called WYG, which has a big presence in Turkey, is currently managing a government campaign of this kind, using cartoon leaflets with appealing characters and simple storylines. These characters endure disasters like broken limbs, redundancy and high medical bills all at once. They repent and, guided by the government's slightly spooky pixelated mascot, sign up for legitimate employment with happy smiles. The end of the story is a flash-forward scene of their cosy, pensioned old age. The leaflet is clearly aimed at the poorer,
religious demographic who work for small businesses and are usually the prime candidates for tax evasion as both employers and employees.

As I have mentioned, there is a problem with underemployment of women in Turkey and the government has recently offered generous incentives to businesses to employ female staff: for example, no tax is paid for female employees for the first year, and after that only fifty per cent of the regular employment tax. There is a similar arrangement for young people, but no one seems to know about these incentives. Either the government has not done enough to spread awareness, or the financial pay-off is not enough to tempt most employers.

Some incentives for female employment are ridiculous. There is a law allowing a married woman to resign from her job at the request of her husband, within a year of starting work, with a full redundancy package. I found this out by accident when I questioned the puzzling presence of unclaimed mugs in the office kitchen cupboard where I worked. It turned out they belonged to women who used to work at the firm, but who had resigned recently, leaving unloved personal items behind. The law that allowed their paid resignation panders to the conservative tradition of a wife not being encouraged to work or being required to concentrate on child-rearing. The law does not stipulate any kind of checks on women who make this particular resignation request, and so it is possible for a woman to repeatedly start a job, receive training and resign within the year, claiming the redundancy package as her legal right. There is very little a company can realistically do to combat this practice. The sobering downside
to an otherwise quite amusing social phenomenon is that it makes companies less open to hiring a female over a male applicant – who knows if she is secretly a Serial Quitter? Better not risk it.

The macho business environment is being gradually balanced by more female promotions, as I mentioned, but sometimes this is done in a way which feels embarrassingly condescending to someone used to the Western version of equal employment. When I was working freelance at a major investment company, I arrived at the office on Valentine's Day to an atmosphere of jubilation. Five female employees had been promoted in honour of this most cherished of dates in the female calendar. Pink posters hung on walls; flowers had been placed on desks. The ladies in the office were all delighted, and of course promotions are great – but something in me felt deeply patronised and resentful at this exaggerated circus of pandering to the female stereotype. I'm sure it was done with the best intentions, and no one was offended but me. I am not sure, however, that J. P. Morgan's London branch would have reacted well to the Ladies' Valentine Special Treat.

The backbone of the Turkish economy is still mass production, despite the growing importance of the financial services and tourism sectors. Turks are brilliant at copying things and producing huge numbers of these copies. There are obvious, practical reasons for the success of this sector in this country – relatively low wages compared to Europe, plenty of workers and space for big factories among other things. Helped by a move towards ‘fast fashion', Turkey continues to challenge China as the main exporter of mass-produced clothes to
Europe, mainly because it is much closer, significantly reducing shipping costs and delivery times. Chinese factories operate on such low profit margins that it is only worth their while to take orders in the thousands of tonnes; Turkey will do smaller orders, which means that high-street chains can order a new season's worth of stock, receive it on time, and order a different batch a few months later for next season. Dealing with China involves the risk of having thousands of late, outdated stock items sitting in warehouses accruing dust and storage fees, while Turkey is a relatively low-risk business partner. Having said that, only the biggest of Turkish companies succeed in the world of mass production – several of the independent clothes factories in central Istanbul have gone bust in the last few years because competition is so fierce and cash-flow problems are usually fatal.

Turks are the most enthusiastic followers of international designer brands outside of the Far East, so one of their most successful clothes-related markets is the replica designer industry. Foreign designer items are prohibitively expensive, so there is a roaring trade in what are often called ‘genuine fakes', good reproductions. While genuine fakes may raise some interesting metaphysical questions in the mind of a native English-speaker, they are straightforwardly real when it comes to hard cash: from the ‘Channel' perfume bottles sold in street bazaars for two lira (about sixty pence) to the exquisite Mulberry handbag replicas displayed in reputable shops for a comfortable seven hundred lira (£250), the Turkish passion for copying foreign designer brands is ubiquitous. The market value of Turkish-produced fakes has increased from one billion lira (around £320 million) to two billion lira in
the last ten years, making it the second biggest counterfeit market after China, and the subject of thousands of lawsuits brought by individual brands as well as Turkey's long-suffering Registered Brand Association.

Big brands are the gold standard of quality, dizzyingly desirable, but why pay a fortune when you could have effectively the same product for so much less? In the most chi-chi parts of Istanbul one can find authorised Prada, Louis Vuitton and even Diane von Fürstenberg outlets; far more widespread are shops with names like FAME and LUKS selling pretty much the same products at a fraction of the price. The better the fake, the higher the price, but the discerning Turkish fashionista is still saving several hundred or even thousand lira apiece on good-quality products which are supposedly made in the same Turkish factories which produce the originals. The salesman's story is that the ‘fakes' are made after normal working hours in, say, the Prada factory with exactly the same materials and are, to all intents and purposes, the same product. More probably, a single item is bought and copied by a ‘designer' who studies its details like a clever painter forging a Caravaggio.

A few months after arriving in Istanbul, I went with my glamorous friend Leyla to a ‘genuine fake' boutique near the Blue Mosque – the critic's choice, if you will. As I watched, Leyla ignored the prominently displayed shiny Prada models and moved swiftly to the Bottega Veneta section, where she picked out a classic criss-crossed tote. She opened it, ran a finger across the lining, squinted at the stitches and finally rejected it on the grounds of the size of the inside zipper. The owner, acknowledging a pro, brought out the superior stock,
and eventually another bag passed her rigorous scrutiny and was purchased for four hundred lira (£150), about £2,500 less than the original. Leyla wears her bag proudly, without fear of discovery, even when she goes to a Bottega store to check out their new-season ranges in the name of research. The Bottega assistants note her bag and treat her like a queen, hoping for what they fondly imagine will be repeat custom.

A step above this kind of boutique store is the private seller who operates his business by invitation only. In the manner of an exclusive members-only club, new potential clients must be brought by an existing patron to an arranged viewing of the very best fakes available. Apparently (I am still hopeful of an invite), most of the clients are wealthy Arab women who could easily afford the original but get a thrill from buying several versions of a bag or favourite pair of shoes for the same price as one original purchase. There is quite a trend for this kind of retail tourism, and the net sales of desirable under-the-counter businesses like this probably make up a high percentage of Turkey's considerable undisclosed income.

The few Turkish designers who make it to international fame, like Nicole Farhi or Bora Aksu, are well respected and indeed commercially successful, but unfortunately there does not seem to be a huge appetite to follow in their footsteps. Designing copies for mass production is more lucrative in the short term than going to design college, but I think there are more important reasons than mere practicality behind the Turkish appetite for copying existing models and playing it safe.

The real reason is education. In Turkish schools, children learn a great deal by rote and regurgitate it for big exams in
high school. Independent thinking is not encouraged, and creativity consequently suffers. For such a large country, there are not as many designers or inventors as there should be, because Turkish ingenuity is largely focused on new business ideas rather than invention for its own sake. Turkey is one of Europe's biggest car producers, with massive Renault factories in Bursa and outside Istanbul, but there has been no Turkish-designed car since the demise of the Anadolu marque in 1986. One still sees a few on the streets of Istanbul today but they went down especially well in rural Turkey, where their fibreglass bodywork was eaten ravenously by roaming farm animals.

I had never quite noticed the correlation between education and industry until I had a conversation with the owner of one of Turkey's biggest construction companies and got an insight into the Turkish business mind. As we talked, the man who had made billions from building roads and energy plants idly picked up his coffee cup: ‘Look. A Turk picks up this cup and thinks, “I can make this.” And he does – he makes hundreds of thousands, exactly the same. But it does not occur to him to design his own. This is Turkey's problem.' I found it both impressive and depressing that a man who had made his money by constructing things on a bigger scale than his competitors had such a clear insight into Turkey's problem with creativity. He was dazzlingly successful proof of his own theory.

Turkey is a developing country – which is easy to forget when you’re living in the cosmopolitan buzz of Istanbul – and it needs to concentrate its resources on building up its economy. That is not done by arts and crafts and individuality but by big industry, banking and construction. Turkish schooling is utilitarian. It prioritises useful, science-based subjects over useless arty subjects and is characterised by box-ticking examinations: ends-based, mechanical and deeply unattractive. There is so much creativity in Turkey, and it is almost always directed towards moneymaking. Many other countries could be charged with the same crime, but I have never before seen it so institutionalised as in Turkey. There is a tendency here to concentrate on the big picture in both business and schooling – overambitious returns on minimum investment, maximum marks from the most efficient cramming. This utilitarian ‘big picture’, while rewarding for the economy, is incredibly short-sighted for society as a whole.

Governmental and municipal neglect of the supposedly superfluous concerns of the arts and the environment, among other things, has a sense of impending tragedy about it – what will be the point of a flourishing economy when Turkey’s landscape is entirely marred by ugly architecture and rubbish-strewn countryside? Who wants to live in a country
thronged with houses expensively but hideously furnished, where people watch glossy soap operas on television, and theatres and libraries stand empty? I taught at a university in Istanbul and saw the products of the Turkish schooling system – grade A, uninspired and uninspiring students; I marched in the Gezi protests and saw these students transformed by a cause – courageous, creative and excited by the future, they were shining examples of what young people should be. The creative output of the protests was astonishing: strangers composed song lyrics together on the streets at night, dancers performed in Gezi Park and people of all ages and backgrounds scrawled poetic graffiti and cartoons on walls and roads everywhere. The contrast made me realise the tragedy of unfulfilled potential in Turkey, and why it is frustrating that a rapidly modernising country is held back by stuffy, outdated institutions and a lack of trust in non-mainstream sectors.

I wanted to work out what fuels the Turkish obsession with volume, repetition and uniformity. Turks are, traditionally, great believers in safety in numbers. If asked where they would live in a perfect world, most would probably answer: ‘In a
site
.’ A
site
(from the French
cité
)
is a characterless gated community, with identical apartments, security guards and a token patch of garden within high walls. Pre-installed on all televisions within the apartments is a direct link to the building’s security-camera screens. It is very telling that Turks are generally less concerned with where they live and more concerned with the building in which they live – provided, of course, that the neighbourhood is respectable (which is to say, full of similar
site
s). Apparently, people feel safer in the
environment of a
site
, but what exactly they feel safe
from
was a mystery to me for some time. Today, crime is impressively low in urban areas and there are no obvious reasons to feel threatened.

The political upheavals of Turkey’s past have a lot to do with the apparently baseless paranoia common to the Turkish middle class. In the years preceding the military coup in 1980 in particular, politically fuelled violence was common in cities and people at large were in considerable danger from various warring political gangs, most of all the extreme nationalists. A friend of mine, now in his fifties, remembers being beaten up by members of the National Front in the late seventies simply because he went to a high school at which German was the main language. The memories of these times live on, and although there is no equivalent physical persecution on the streets any longer, the fear remains, and has most recently been fuelled by the Gezi protests. Even before the protests, the old lady who lives on the fourth floor of my building had steel shutters on her (definitely inaccessible) back window, which I found amusing in a depressing way, like watching a hypochondriac swaddled in wool on a fine summer’s day.

Turks still feel vulnerable on the international stage, and are arguably insecure at the epicentre of a conflicted geopolitical region. Much of their insecurity is historical, ingrained. The lingering sense of unease which persists from past troubles has resulted in a conviction of safety in numbers. On top of that, there is a swiftly growing middle class, which brings with it the old-fashioned, middle-class brand of paranoia that manifests itself as curtain-twitching in English suburbia, and is certainly not particular to Turkey.

As I described earlier, a village-like sense of community is still obvious in traditional neighbourhoods in Istanbul. While the relative novelty of supermarkets appeals to many city-dwellers, in small neighbourhoods people often prefer the daily visiting vegetable seller, not from any kind of individualistic consumer stance but because everyone else in the vicinity buys from him. He is a trusted part of the community, and in a strange way more unifying than an anonymous supermarket. On the other hand, malls are hugely popular. Galleria Atakoy in Istanbul was the first, modern mall built in Turkey, in 1988 – the Grand Bazaar of 1461 was the labyrinthine, long-lived precursor to the security-checked, concrete constructions of today. There are now 366 malls in Turkey, new ones popping up all the time for locals who crave their comforting, highly polished vastness. A mall delivers a reassuring sense of community in its own way; like a
site
, everything is contained within walls, other respectable people of middle to high income are buying from the same shops, and nothing is unknown or threatening. More than anything else, a trip to a mall is a fun day out for a Turkish family, especially in Istanbul, where there are hardly any green spaces.

I have never been to school in Turkey, so for a while I did not appreciate the link between the mass mentality I have been describing and the Turkish education system. However, about nine months in to my stay in Istanbul I was offered a post teaching Latin at the Boğaziçi (Bosphorus) University, situated next to Mehmet II’s ‘Throat Cutter’ fortress on the European side of the Bosphorus. I had no formal teaching experience, I was in fact younger than
some of my students, and my only qualification was that I had studied classics at a British university. Why did they hire me? Partly because there are very few Latin teachers in Turkey, but also because no one else would accept the ridiculously low level of pay offered by a state university. Ceyda Seçim, the charismatic don who persuaded me to take the job, was very honest about the state of things: ‘Our teachers are here because they love it.’ Fair enough, I thought. The following week, I represented the entire Latin staff of the university.

Boğaziçi is a puzzling paradox; currently ranked the top university in Turkey, it is modelled both architecturally and academically on an Ivy League university, while receiving totally inadequate funding from the state. It looks like Princeton from the outside and Wandsworth prison from the inside and follows the American style of courses composed of majors and minor options. It also follows a highly inflated grade system, which led to a fiasco when I came to mark my students’ papers at the end of the year. Dealing out the kind of marks normal to an English university (where anything between sixty and seventy per cent is average), I awarded my students a clutch of what I considered unremarkable grades. A couple had done surprisingly well, a couple not so well. Within a few minutes of publishing their grades, I had received a deluge of emails from my students demanding an explanation for my outrageously low marking. One student asked, with chilling politeness, whether perhaps I had not received one of her answer sheets? Others were frantic, and one student, whose major was in genetic science, declared that I had ruined his life. I realised – rather late – that Boğaziçi followed
the American system where anything below the eighty per cent mark is shamefully low. What I did not understand was why they felt entitled to demand that I increase their grades in such a hysterical and entitled manner. A fellow teacher explained: ‘They think of you as a civil servant. They are studying in order to improve their chances of getting a good job, and they won’t let you stand in the way of that.’

Boğaziçi picks the very best high-school applicants from national exam results, and boasts some great teachers, despite the ludicrous state salary. The department heads live in constant fear of their staff decamping to private universities like Koç, Sabancı, Bilgi or Yeditepe, where private funding is plentiful. I fear it is only a matter of time before Boğaziçi runs out of the historical cachet which currently ensures its top position.

I was so impressed when I first walked onto the campus for my interview: grey stone, ivy-wreathed buildings around a sun-dappled quad, an oasis of Ivy League sophistication in the middle of Istanbul. Inside the buildings is a different matter – the unmistakable smell of industrial detergent in dark corridors, walls badly in need of paint and no lift in a building of six storeys. Just like the rest of Istanbul, lazy feral dogs command the outdoor realms of the campus, and cats occupy most rooms – curled in library shelves, under desks, begging at tables in the canteen.

On the first day of term, I strode confidently into class, books in hand. To my dismay, I was faced by rows of expectant students, pens at the ready, who looked at least as old as me. In an effort to impress upon them my infinite knowledge of all things Latin, I began to talk airily of Catullus and fifth
declensions, but was soon interrupted by a tortoiseshell tomcat who completely ruined the gravitas of my teaching style by leaping onto my desk from nowhere. When I shut him out of the room, he mewed pitifully until allowed back in. From then on, I learned to embrace all manner of teacher’s pets.

Boğaziçi is woefully underfunded. At the beginning of December in my first term, I arrived on campus one day to find the Western Languages building covered in scaffolding and workmen; the inside had been partly gutted already, and drills pierced the usual scholarly hush. I picked my way through exposed piping and buckets of paint to find the registrar, Yelda. She told me that all my classes had been relocated to the engineering department on the other campus for the foreseeable future.

‘I see. Why?’

Yelda gestured at the rubble encroaching into her office and looked at me wearily. ‘The department still has some of its budget left and has to use it by the end of the calendar year. They decided to renovate the building.’ The unbending rules of state funding meant that the university would lose this portion of the money unless they used it before January. Instead of being saved for the next order of books for the understocked library, or added to the teachers’ salaries at the end of the academic year, it had to be used now. So the run-up to December exams was blighted by noisy renovation; students struggled to find relocated classes and fought for precious library space as exams loomed, but the departmental budget was safely spent.

By contrast, the atmosphere in private universities like Koç is heavy with wealth and privilege. Renovation is the last
thing needed, for one thing, the university having been built in 2000 by the multibillionaire Koç family. Car parks are full of Porsches, books spill out of Gucci handbags, and its fees ensure that – with the exception of a few scholarships – only the graduates of expensive private high schools can attend. The universities boast correspondingly expensive teachers, for example the celebrated historian Norman Stone, who has now left Koç for Bilkent University in Ankara, another private institution. Stone is a superstar among history buffs, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and a bestselling author of genuinely gripping historical tomes, and yet he has been lured to teach on a remote university campus in central Anatolia. It is a significant and impressive choice, and partly reflective of the standards of private Turkish universities.

Teaching the products of the Turkish educational system at university level made me realise what the system was all about. My students were very bright, and had been picked for their exemplary grades at national high-school entrance exams, but their lack of interest in the subject was disheartening even for an accidental Latin don. The course was an elective rather than a core subject, so the students could be excused for not being as invested in Latin as in their major courses, but it was still rather sad that the most common question I ever got asked was: ‘Will this be in the exams?’ The answer ‘Yes’ would be met by a frenzied scribbling of notes, ‘No’ by a vaguely reproachful blankness.

Only one of my students asked anything in the spirit of enquiry rather than for exam-focused information. He was a unique individual in more ways than one, and my first introduction to his particular breed of intellectualism was a quasi-Shakespearean
email he sent in response to a businesslike query about weekly timetables that I had sent to the entire class before term started. His reply was clearly the product of much toil with a dated dictionary, his style both elevated and constrained by a concern to be as polite as possible to a new and potentially draconian teacher. I copy it below:

I was of course delighted with this email and looked forward to meeting its author; he did not disappoint. A leftist, despite his formal English, he would stay behind after class to discuss Marx and the Beatles with me, and one memorable afternoon he delivered an awkwardly phrased but impassioned polemic on the atrocities committed by America on the English language. According to İbrahim, Americans should not be
allowed to speak English, because it is a language fit only for the elegance of traditional English expression, as delivered by proper English people. İbrahim despised phrases like ‘I figured’ and ‘That sucks’ and refused to watch any Hollywood films on principle; previous exposure to the movie genre had instilled in him a hatred of actors like Tom Cruise and other prominent examples of the American Uncouth. İbrahim reminded me of my old-fashioned English grandfather, and yet here was an earnest nineteen-year-old Turkish boy, unshakeable in the charmingly snobby literary convictions which he had picked up from a childhood of reading English classics. He applied his pedantic rigour to Latin, demanding etymological explanations for all new vocabulary and asking expansive questions about the rule of Augustus. The rest of the class found him a great nuisance, as did I on occasion, but he kept us all on our toes, and actually I think he overdid the smart Alec act to prove a point – he had an intellect, and he wanted to feed it. İbrahim was a shining exception of curiosity and individuality among a class of clever young people dulled by their Dickensian school years.